After doing the Atlin photos, I seem to be inspired to continue working on backlogged photos. Here is an album of the wooden trestles at the Myra Canyon section of the Kettle Valley railway in Southern British Columbia. Enjoy.
I've also changed the colour scheme. Some readers felt the white text on dark red background difficult to read. If you have a strong preference either way, let me know.
After many months, I've finally put together the photos from my kayaking trip last summer to Atlin Lake with my father. As with all my photos, you will always be able to find them in the photos sections of the website. Most of the photos were taken by my father, but I've done some editing to them, as well limits my galery to some 94 photos out of the original near-500 total. Note that higher resolutions images can be seen by clicking on any of the photos in the album.
I'm sure I've told many about the trip, but I'm very pleased to have a photographic record up on the website. It was, in many ways, an amazing trip. To support that claim, I think the photos mostly speak for themselves. Enjoy.
One of the things I think about fairly frequently these days is the art of conversation. I feel many of my past mistakes and shortcoming relate to failings in conversation. Furthermore, since so much of my interaction with people is simply in conversation, I feel it behooves me to improve myself in this area. This starts with something as simple as working to break the habit of interrupting, but leads to slightly more developed thoughts, such as the subject of this post.
That subject is the following observation: many people talk about winning and losing arguments. I feel that, with very rare exceptions, this is a miserable approach to arguments specifically and conversation in general.
This opinion comes from reflecting on the purposes of our conversations, both what those purposes actually are and what I feel they should aspire to be. Speaking about winning and losing arguments assumes that the purpose of an argument is to engage in competition of ideas and come out the victor. I feel this purpose is misguided and we should strive to avoid it.
The goal to win arguments is mostly problematic because it precludes many other purposes. Arguments allow us to try and test ideas. They allow for the possibility of working through important conflict. (The risk, of course, is that they instead escalate conflict). They provide opportunity to reconsider and reflect with new information. But these purpose are very difficult to even recognize, let alone actualize, when stuck in a competitive mindset.
If you are trying to win, then at some level, the actual content produced by your partner/opponent in this argument is irrelevant. That content matters only in how it presents an obstacle to your victory, not for any inherent value. If you are trying to win, you listen for flaws in you partner’s argument. You try to pick it apart, looking for its logical fallacies and factual inaccuracies. You have no incentive to serious consider its merits with an open mind -- you’ve already decided and you are correct, and only need to listen with a critics ear for ammunition for your retort.
Most importantly, if you are trying to win, you preclude the possibility of being wrong and learning from your mistake. This is a great loss. Conversation is a great ability to learn, to be aware of the limits of your own knowledge. Argument is particularly useful, since it arises specifically to address a difference in opinion.
I feel this can be taken even as far as formalized debate. To state it very strongly, I feel that to enter a debate without the possibility of being persuaded against your original opinion is disingenuous. While I enjoy wit and banter, I’m not really interested in conversation solely as a sparing tool. I’m not interested in hearing a debate where the participants have already encroached their positions and will no be moved, regardless what new experience may arise. (This, unfortunately, make me intolerant of most political debate, as well as the many of the perennial science/religion debates that seems to be popular).
To end with a tangent, this very same observation relates to a uneasiness that reaches back to my youth. I grew up in a church community which, while not necessarily part of the evangelical movement, was sufficiently evangelical that I felt pressure to proselytize. I experienced a serious uneasiness with this pressure quite early -- many years before I was able to comfortably voice it. I feel this uneasiness comes from the fact that proselytizing conversation falls into the same trap. It is conversation that starts this way: “I’m right about God and you’re wrong. Let me tell you about it.” No honest conversation can begin this way. Instead of winning arguments, the missionary tries to win converts, but the same competitive aspect destroys the potential for real, honest exchange. Instead, the only missionary conversation that I’m interested in these days starts instead with this: “Let’s share our thoughts and God and see what we learn.”
I’ll stop here, other than to point out that winning conversation has many other implications unrelated to this post, which focuses on the lost opportunity to more honest interaction. In particular, I’ve not commented on the social and psychological dynamics of dominance and submission in groups and relationships which are established and maintained by small and subtle competitions and victories in conversation. A topic for another post, perhaps.
As you may have guessed from the title, I’m not of fan of the romantically oriented holiday that falls on the Tuesday of this week. I’m suggesting that you feel free to simply ignore it, and I’d like to list some reasons for this position.
First, its cruel to those who are lonely. While this reality is true of many other holidays, and I know people in North America with absent or estranged families find Christmas difficult, other holidays are not organized around a single social status the way Valentine’s Day is. Valentine’s Day implicitly enforces the expectation that to be a full, normal participant of our culture, you should be in a successful, happy romantic relationship. This expectation is not only unfair to those who’ve found it difficult to establish such a relationship, but also unreasonable to the general social structure of our society.
We, as a society and a culture, need full and empowered participation by those in all kinds of social statuses and relationship. We need all those perspectives to understand who we are and what we ought to be doing with our time and resources. Declaring that the only really real or successful people are those in long time committed relationship risks losing the perspectives of many others: those who’ve intentionally chosen celebecy, those who have been often rejected and forced bitterly to give up on relationships, those whose have a long series of shorter relationships and even the honestly and intentionally poly-amorous.
Second, it creates strange guilt and expectation in relationships and marriages. Let me put it this way: if my wife is truly upset by the fact that I’ve forgotten an externally mandated celebration of our love, and if our marriage is actually damaged by my lack of providing flowers and chocolates, then there is something seriously wrong with our marriage. In a healthy relationship, we don’t need external excuses to buy gifts or remind each other of our affection. These reminders happen as part of our natural care and conscious effort to maintain our love. Moreover, these reminders of our affection are spontaneous and honest. An act of love which is pressured by the guilt or expectation created by an event such as Valentine's day is, at some level, suspect. Acts of love should simply be that -- acts motivated by love for your partner, not guilt or expectation.
Third, it's become very commercial. I’m not sure -- maybe it always was this commercial, but it feels that the major driving forces behind the holiday are market forces seeking to sell Valentine's day gifts and services. Moreover, it’s assumed that the way to show affection on the holiday is to spend money on something. While spending money and buying gifts can be an excellent way to show affection, having it as the default method in a holiday which is only about romantic relationships is terrifying to me. Spending money to show your love should be one of very many different ways, and certainly not the default.
Fourth, it has little to do with St. Valentine. Now, I admit this is mostly a complaint about the name, and that the history of how certain themes get associated to certain saints is a strange history, but I still find it odd. As far as I know, little is known of St. Valentine other that the fact that he was a martyr in the Roman Church. This association of his name with the holiday just seems strange to me.
Therefore, I’m suggesting you consider giving it a skip. Particularly if you are in a relationship and are feeling strangeness, guilt, insecurity and confusion about all the expectations, then suggest to your partner that you forgo the occasion. Have faith that suggesting you don’t need Valentine's day is not the same thing as suggesting that you lack love -- in fact, it may make you more able to demonstrate real affection in more honest, less culturally loaded situations.
Lastly, my wife makes the excellent point after reading the above that a more productive suggestion might be to expand the holiday instead of ignoring it. Celebrating love is a good thing, and one could celebrate the love in all relationships, instead of just focusing on romantic relationships.
Post Scriptum: I wrote the previous before I saw February 13th's XKCD comic. Unsurprisingly, Randall Munroe captures the essence of the problem much more succintly and amusingly.